"Personification" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with an equally blank look of despair; as he stood with his legs apart and his arms hanging down by his side—the very personification of imbecility. "If I wos a fly I'd know wot to do. I'd walk up the side o' that cliff till I got to a dry bit, and then I'd stick on. But, not bein' a fly, in coorse ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... evil. The only superstition attributed to him which does not at first sight seem to have its root in dread is that of the Orphic mysteries. But of them Muller says that the Dionusos whom they worshipped "was an infernal deity, connected with Hades, and was the personification, not merely of rapturous pleasure, but of a deep sorrow for the miseries of human life." The Orphic societies of Greece seem to have been peculiarly ascetic, taking no animal food save raw flesh from the sacrificed ox of Dionusos. And Plato speaks ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... long hair and blew it about his face till he became an equestrian personification of the frenzied muse. I had become acquainted with his trick of setting words to the music of quaint rhymes; but Father Holland was ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... It is accompanied by the morning-breath (Dam-i-Subh), the current of air, almost imperceptible except by the increase of cold, which Moslem physiologists suppose to be the early prayer offered by Nature to the First Cause. The Ghoul-i-Biyaban (Desert-Demon) is evidently the personification of man's fears and of the dangers that surround travelling in the wilds. The "wold-where-none-save-He (Allah)-can-dwell" is a great and terrible wilderness (Dasht-i-la-siwa Hu); and Allah's Holy Hill is Arafat, near Mecca, which the Caravan ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... effective. It beat the spear into a pruning hook. With this to leaven them, the rough habiliments were most becoming. In a word, they supplied the very setting which manhood should have; and since Anthony, sitting there at his meat, was the personification of virility, they served, as all true settings should, by self-effacement to magnify their treasure. The ex-officer might have ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... A mythological serpent, the personification of eternity, and king of the Nagas, or snakes, who inhabit Patala, the lowermost of the seven regions below the earth. His body formed the couch of Vishnu, reposing on the waters of Chaos, whilst his thousand heads were the god's canopy. He ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... of view, of the one man who in himself summed up and embodied the greatness of the possibilities which Sea Power comprehends,—the man for whom genius and opportunity worked together, to make him the personification of the Navy of Great Britain, the dominant factor in the periods hitherto treated. In the century and a half embraced in those periods, the tide of influence and of power has swelled higher and higher, floating upward before the ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... position he has frequently passed your open door, though—probably being warned by the benevolent—he has never yet entered. Now this Yuen Yan, save for one or two unimportant details, is the reflected personification of your own exalted image, nor would those most intimate with your form and outline be able to pronounce definitely unless you stood side by side before them. Furthermore, he is by nature unable to hear any remark addressed to him, and is incapable of expressing ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... an unknown wilderness. Cannibals still lurk in the black depths of the pathless jungle; weird tribal customs linger unchanged in barbarous campongs, where strange gods are worshipped with the immemorial rites of an ageless past, rude carvings and weird symbols showing the personification of those natural phenomena deified by primeval tribes. Sumatra, with her wealth of mines and forests and her important geographical position, remains as yet an almost undiscovered country, and though her undeveloped resources excite the cupidity and arouse ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... over the hatch-door, her rosy cheek half-resting on the rough shoulder of her rough husband, was the pretty Mistress Maud, the personification of rustic English beauty; then the picturesque grouping of the old and worn, but still gallant and manly sailors—our friend of the wooden legs a little in the fore-ground, supported by the quizzical seaman, and a tall stiff bony-looking "Black Sal" of ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... outgrown it, have so completely exchanged mythology for curiosity, and metaphor for science, that the necessary conditions for great art are wanting. Our deepest thoughts about the world and God are incapable of personification by any aesthetic process; they never enter that atmosphere wherein alone they could become through fine art luminous. For the painter, who is the form-giver, they have ceased to be shining stars, and are seen as opaque stones; and though divinity ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... has given to Catholic France, Catholic Belgium, Catholic England, these eminent leaders who in public and social life, are by their fearless courage and ceaseless action, the very personification of Catholicism? It is without doubt their Catholic Congresses. There, the contact with the great problems of the day gave them the vision of things before unseen, made them emerge from the common mass, and marked them as leaders. There, they learned to think just, broad ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... speaks of incidents in our Lord's life which are related by an eye-witness without any intermediation between Christ and the reporter, he describes them as 'coming from the Truth's self' [193:1] ([Greek: ap' autes tes aletheias]). This personification of Christ as 'the Truth' is confined ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... probably made his work difficult to him. There was something perplexing in the necessity which bound him to look upon the young lady before him both as Jael and as the future Mrs Conway Dalrymple, knowing as he did that she was at present simply Clara Van Siever. A double personification was not difficult to him. He had encountered it with every model that had sat to him, and with every young lady he had attempted to win,—if he had ever made such an attempt with one before. But the triple character, joined to the necessity of the double work, was distressing to him. ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... material prosperity had struggled in vain against the predominance of immediate interests and local prepossessions. The conflict, indeed, was not yet over. Two generations of civic strife were still to signalize the slow and painful growth of the love for "The Union"; that personification of national being, upon which can safely fasten the instinct of human nature to centre devotion upon a person and a name. But, through these years of fluctuating affections, the work of the War of 1812 was ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... may have been, the lyrics about slavery or the war, except in very rare cases. The truth is, the Muse, for a lady who has seen so much of life and the ways of the world, is an excessively jealous personification, and is apt to punish with oblivion a mixed devotion at her shrine. The poet who desires to improve and exalt his time must make up his mind to a double martyrdom,—first, to be execrated by vast numbers of respectable people, and then to be forgotten by ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the Williams house stood gaunt and untenanted, the personification of a haunted house. If only a place with such a history could have been renovated and kept, instead of disappearing ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... Siam—telling him of our rescue. Lady Paget and he were waiting at the station to meet us. They straightway took my wife and myself off to the British Legation in Copenhagen, and insisted on us remaining there as their guests during our stay in the Danish capital. They were the personification of kindness to us, and helped us in every possible way, and it would be quite impossible for us to express adequately our great indebtedness to them. We obtained fresh vises for our passports from the British, Swedish, and Norwegian Consulates, and my wife, who ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... borrowed from organic or from inorganic nature, is not a personification at all, but the conventional sign or equivalent of some object or notion, to which it may perhaps bear no visible resemblance, but with which the intellect or the imagination has in ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... another personification of the marvellous power of music among primitive peoples. Their parentage also is variously given, though they are usually mentioned as daughters of the river god, Achelous. They are generally represented as maidens, with a more ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... killed you? If the corpse say no one, the inquest ceases; but if it states that some person has, the bier moves round, the corpse is said to produce the motion, influenced by kuingo (a fabulous personification of death). If the alleged murderer be present, the bier is carried round by this influence, and one of the branches made to touch him. Upon this a battle is sure to ensue either immediately, or in the course of a day ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... should have been selected for important political positions, but can easily understand why he was the admiration of the highest social circles for his wit and the elegance of his conversation. He was the personification of urbanity and every gentlemanly quality, as well as one of the best scholars of his age; but it was only in an aristocratic age, when a few great nobles controlled public affairs, that such a man could have been so recognized, rewarded, and honored. He died beloved ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... of John Brown to American history does not consist in the things which he did but rather in that which he has been made to represent. He has been accepted as the personification ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... truth to say that it had made such a compact unnecessary. Amherst had done his best to take up their life together as though there had been no break in it; but slowly the fact was being forced on her that by remaining with him she was subjecting him to intolerable suffering—was coming to be the personification of the very thoughts and associations from which he struggled to escape. Happily her promptness of action had preserved Westmore to him, and in Westmore she believed that he would in time find a refuge from even the memory of what he was now enduring. But ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... our view a vast panorama of symbolic forms for us to read. In whatever form, angle, or color they present themselves, the true student of Nature can interpret and understand their symbolic language aright. It has been by the personification of Nature's symbols, that man has become ignorant of their language. There is no form, sound, nor color but what has its laws of expression; and only a perfect knowledge of symbolism will enable man to know the ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... people discriminate," she whispered back. "You think because he wrote about rough people he must be rough; and when one writes about people of culture and elegance you think straightway that he is the personification of those ideas. You forget, you see, that the world is full to the brim with hypocrisy; and it is easier to be perfect on paper than it is anywhere ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... description of twenty-eight differing qualities in men. The description in each chapter was not of a man, but of a quality. The method of Theophrastus, as Casaubon said, was between the philosophical and the poetical. He described a quality, but he described it by personification, and his aim was the amending of men's manners. The twenty-eight chapters that have come down to us are probably no more than a fragment of a larger work. They describe vices, and not all of them. Another part, now lost, may have described the virtues. In a short proem ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... the face to vindicate him from falsehood in not making a better distinction, I should feel the less inclined to deny his being a savage, while I behold him wantoning with the wounded feelings of a forlorn, hopeless and unhappy parent. If his personification had embraced the meeting merely, he ought to have known that even the dead are not always unavenged, and that its ghost at least, would have arisen from the tomb to flutter round and haunt the unhappy county of Saratoga on the eve of the next nomination, in the form of a book; that thing which ...
— A Review and Exposition, of the Falsehoods and Misrepresentations, of a Pamphlet Addressed to the Republicans of the County of Saratoga, Signed, "A Citizen" • An Elector
... Revolutionary Committee, persons with incomes of only 4,000, 3,700, 1,500, and even 500 livres.[41121] Moreover, a fortune or a competence, inspires its possessor with anti-revolutionary sentiments; consequently, he is for the moment an obstruction; "You are rich," says Cambon, making use of a personification, "you cherish an opinion, which compels us to be on the defensive; pay then, so as to indemnify us and be thankful for our indulgence which, precautionary and until peace is declared, keeps you under bolt and bar."[41122] Rich, anti-revolutionary, and vicious," according ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... at Athens just at the moment of his appearance upon the stage of public life, imagine what an impression such a phenomenon must have made upon a people so lost in profligacy and sensuality of all sorts. What wonder that the unprincipled though gifted Demades, the very personification of the witty and reckless libertinism of the age, should deride and scoff at this strange man, living as nobody else lived, thinking as nobody else thought; a prophet, crying from his solitude of great troubles at hand; the apostle of the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... impressions they make on a sensitive soul. The external forms of things are to be presented to us as transformed through the heart and mind of the poet. The moon is endowed with life and will, "stooping", "riding", "wand'ring", "bowing her head", not as a frigid personification, and because the ancient poets so personified her, but by communication to her of the intense agitation which the nocturnal spectacle rouses in ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... deities of Babylonia were adopted by the Assyrians. But in Assyria they were always somewhat of an exotic, and even the learned class invoked Assur rather than the other gods. Assur was the personification of the old capital of the country and of the nation itself, and though the scribes found an etymology for the name in that of An-sar, the primaeval god of Sumerian cosmogony, the fact was always remembered. Assur was purely Semitic ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... Provencal Courts of Love, was the allegorical personification of the husband; and Disdain suitably represents the lover's corresponding difficulty from ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... senior, who stood in the doorway of his mansion, his hands in his vest pockets, his head uncovered, and his happy visage smiling through a cloud of smoke that issued from his lips. He seemed the very personification of jovial good-humour, and what one might suppose Cupid would become were he permitted to grow old, dress recklessly, and take ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... The chiefs of the opposition inferred from the laughing and cheering of the Bishop's enemies, and from the silence of his friends, that there would be no difficulty in driving from Court, with contumely, the prelate whom of all prelates they most detested, as the personification of the latitudinarian spirit, a Jack Presbyter in lawn sleeves. They, therefore, after the lapse of a few hours, moved quite unexpectedly an address requesting the King to remove the Bishop of Salisbury from ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... one of the most noxious tendencies of the mind—namely, personification. It is one of the most virulent enemies of clear thinking. We speak of the Spirit of the Reformation or the Spirit of Revolt or the Spirit of Disorder and Anarchy. The papers tell us that, "Berlin says", "London says", "Uncle Sam so decides", "John Bull is ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... in bringing the wreath away piecemeal; and then they give themselves up to mutual embraces, groans, laments, and all the enginery of pathetic affection in the last gasping throes of separation,—to the doleful tearing of hair and the rending of their fantastic garments. It is the personification of legalized rowdyism; and if young men would but confine themselves to such rowdyism as may be looked at and laughed at by their mothers and sisters, they would find life just as amusing and a thousand times ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... into symbol and figure—but far too living and real, addressed with too intense and natural feeling, to be the mere personification of anything. The lady of the philosophical Canzoni has vanished. The student's dream has been broken, as the boy's had been; and the earnestness of the man, enlightened by sorrow, overleaping the student's formalities and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... whom they call Mahadeo or Siva, Sahadeo, one of the five Pandava brothers, and the goddess Lakshmi. They say that the buffalo is Mahadeo, the cow Sahadeo, and the rice Lakshmi. This also appears to be an instance of the personification of animals and the corn ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... the requirements of both metre and sense, and the words untalk'd of and unseen make it nearly indisputable. I had at first thought it might be "rumorous eyes;" but the personification would then be wanting. Shakspeare has personified Rumour in the Introduction to the Second Part of King Henry IV.; and in Coriolanus, Act ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... describe in more detail the "dramatic and impressive" situations and the "fearful events" that were to be evolved, making it pretty clear that the purpose somewhat vaguely and cautiously outlined in the earliest preface was rather of the nature of an afterthought. Falkland is not intended to be a personification of the evils caused by the social system, nor is he put forward as the inevitable product of that system. The reader's attention is chiefly absorbed by the extraordinary contest between Caleb Williams and Falkland, and in the tragic situations ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... varied, the most erroneous opinions have been expressed with regard to the famous individual commonly known as Bluebeard. None, perhaps, was less tenable than that which made of this gentleman a personification of the Sun. For this is what a certain school of comparative mythology set itself to do, some forty years ago. It informed the world that the seven wives of Bluebeard were the Dawns, and that his two brothers-in-law were the morning and the evening Twilight, identifying them with the ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France
... a coxcomb, and you are another!" replied the father, who, dressed in an old flannel dressing-gown, with a worn velvet cap on his head, and cowering gloomily over a wretched fire, seemed no bad personification of that mixture of half-hypochondriac, half-miser, which he was in reality. "Don't talk to me of going to town, ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... death as a female figure in dark robes, with black wings, with ravenous teeth, hovering everywhere, darting here and there, eager for prey. Such a view is a personification of the mysteriousness, suddenness, inevitableness, and fearfulness, connected with the subject of death in men's minds, rather than of death itself. These thoughts are grouped into an imaginary being, whose sum ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... entangled amid what seem to be symbolized memories of unusual floodings of the river Nile. "The Noah of Egypt," says Professor Hitchcock, in his singularly ingenious essay (Historical and Geological Deluges Compared), "appears to have been Osiris. Typhon, a personification of the ocean, enticed him into an ark, which, being closed, he was forced to sea; and it was a curious fact, that he embarked on the seventeenth day of the month Athyr,—the very day, most probably, when Noah entered the ark." The classical tradition of ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... a universal law of conduct: Shelley himself makes extremely short work of Jupiter, just as Siegfried does of Fafnir, Mime, and Wotan; and the fact that Prometheus is saved from doing the destructive part of his work by the intervention of that very nebulous personification of Eternity called Demogorgon, does not in the least save the situation, because, flatly, there is no such person as Demogorgon, and if Prometheus does not pull down Jupiter himself, no one else will. ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... themselves on the phenomena of nature, they were relieved at being able to utter the thoughts of their hearts in figures of speech which to them were not figures, and were already consecrated by tradition. Hesiod and the Orphic poets moved in a region of half-personification in which the meaning or principle appeared through the person. In their vaster conceptions of Chaos, Erebus, Aether, Night, and the like, the first rude attempts at generalization are dimly seen. The Gods themselves, especially the greater Gods, such as Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Athene, are universals ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... overwhelmed and stupefied by their exhausting labor, indicates the work of a profound thinker; whilst the atmosphere, the play of the diffused glow of the molten metal, are the production of an innate colorist. Her portrait of Benjamin-Constant represents not only the masterful man, but is also the personification of the painter. The attentive attitude, discerning eye, the openness of the absorbing look, the cerebral mask where rests so much tranquil power, the impressive shape of the leonine face, all combine to make the painting one of the finest portraits ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... circulated, and acquired considerable popularity throughout England. In spite of the time that has elapsed, and numberless destructions, there still remain forty-five manuscripts of the poem, more or less complete. "Piers Plowman" soon became a sign and a symbol, a sort of password, a personification of the labouring classes, of the honest and courageous workman. John Ball invoked his authority in his letter to the rebel peasants of the county of Essex in 1381.[665] The name of Piers figured as ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... This personification of the passion of Love, by Peyre Vidal, has been referred to as a proof of how little the Provencal poets were indebted to the authors of Greece and Rome for ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... and with quivering lips, still looked the personification of revolt, he placed his warm, gentle hands upon hers and drew her a little ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... a great impression upon George. The latter, already esteeming himself above the average of mentality and enterprise in what he considered the "slow-poke" town of Bayport, found in the brilliant arrival from foreign parts the personification of his ideals, a satisfying specimen of that much read of genus, "the complete man of the world." He fell on his knees before that specimen and worshiped. Such idolatry could not but have some effect, even upon ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... alike in this respect. I don't suppose Mrs. Smiley realizes that 'Maudie' would be called by a doubter a falsetto disguise of her own voice, and 'Wilbur' a shrewd and humorous personification of her subconscious self; or, if she does, she probably ascribes it to the process of materialization which 'takes from' the medium. Never but once have I had the sensation of being in the presence of a real spirit personality, and that happened ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... this opposition, between romance and sobriety, that excites so strong a prejudice against the former: it is associated, in the minds of many, with folly alone. A romantic, silly girl, is the object of their contempt; and they so recoil from this personification of sentiment, that their chief object seems to be to divest themselves altogether of its delusion. Life is to them a mere calculation; expediency is their maxim; propriety their rule; profit, ease, ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... letters," he said, "I may have none to compare with me, yet in my personification of the 'superior man' I have not as yet ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... of our problem we should clearly distinguish between the various forms of imagination. It reveals itself not merely in art and literature, in fantastic conception, in personification and metaphor, but in every important department of human life. It is the tap-root of progress, as Mr. Lowell well points out. It pictures an ideal life in advance of the actual, which ideal becomes the object of effort. The forms of imagination may, therefore, ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... opposition; as, he failed notwithstanding his good intentions; or, he persevered in spite of the most bitter hostility. When despite and in spite of are applied to inanimate things, it is with something of personification; "in spite of the storm" is said as if the storm had a hostile purpose to ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Kienlung, and presented to him his credentials, without performing the prostration of the Kotow—the Chinese act of homage from the vassal to the sovereign lord. Ceremonies between superiors and inferiors are the personification of principles. Nearly twenty-five years after the repulse of Lord Macartney, in 1816, another splendid embassy was despatched by the British government, in the person of Lord Amherst, who was much more rudely dismissed, ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... though lacking in the gift of formal speech-making, as Grant was, he could talk well, in clear sentences, whose mold was set by precise thought, which brought with it the eloquence that gains its point. It was more than personality, in this instance, that had appeal. He was the personification of ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... king was enduring their tortures in one apartment, the queen was suffering indignities and outrages equally atrocious in another. Maria Antoinette was, in the eyes of the populace, the personification of every thing to be hated. They believed her to be infamous as a wife; proud, tyrannical, and treacherous; that, as an Austrian, she hated France; that she was doing all in her power to induce foreign armies ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... to think of this strong personality as being overcome with soft emotions. We have regarded him as the personification of strength, and yet with all his gigantic power over men and himself, he had a real womanly supply of human tenderness. Once he was seen weeping before the portrait of his much beloved son, whom he called "Mon pauvre petit chou." ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... like 'Kenilworth'; it is certainly more resembling a romance than a novel; in my opinion, one of the most interesting works that ever emanated from the great Sir Walter's pen. Varney is certainly the personification of consummate villainy; and in the delineation of his dark and profoundly and artful mind, Scott exhibits a wonderful knowledge of human nature, as well as surprising skill in embodying his perceptions, so as to enable others to become participators ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... me she would be here," he mentally said, "and I should really like to mark the contrast between her and the brilliant Miss Fenton. Oh! there she is, as I live, leaning on the arm of her father, the very personification of innocence and beauty. But her face is too calm by half. I ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... exist with him and the words he was writing. When he had finished the last word he turned round, and then his whole person, with his countenance and his eyes, exhibited one of the justest pantomimic representations of laziness which it is possible to conceive. After he had a moment dwelt upon this personification, which his fancy suggested to him, he made an expressive transition to the looks and manners of a person filled with that dread and abhorrence which the idea of laziness ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... distinction thus suggested needs constantly to be insisted on,—would explain the Paradise of the West as being a mere allegory, and regard Amitabha, as he was originally conceived to be, as merely an ideal personification of boundless light. But to the people generally the Undefiled Ground and its presiding ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... last evening was the address of Mrs. Zerelda G. Wallace (Ind.) on Woman's Ballot a Necessity for the Permanence of Free Institutions. A Washington paper said: "As she stood upon the platform, holding her hearers as in her hand, she looked a veritable queen in Israel and the personification of womanly dignity and lofty bearing. The line of her argument was irresistible, and her eloquence and pathos perfectly bewildering. Round after round of applause greeted her as she poured out her words with telling effect upon ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... many reflections came to me as to the extraordinary nature of my experiences during the past few days. Had any man ever known the like, I wondered? What could they mean and what could this marvellous woman Ayesha be? Was she perhaps a personification of Nature itself, as indeed to some extent all women are? Was she human at all, or was she some spirit symbolising a departed people, faith and civilisation, and haunting the ruins where once she reigned as queen? No, the idea was ridiculous, since such beings ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... perceive, by the twelve tasks, that the astronomical theory was applied to the mythus of the hero, and that he was regarded as a personification of the Sun, which passes through the twelve signs of the Zodiac. This, probably, took place during the Alexandrian period. Some resemblance between his attributes and those of the Deity, with whom the Egyptian priests ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Spirit or personification of Chivalry, surrounded by men of various pursuits, religious, military, and civil, who represent, as by an upper court or house, the final acquisition of her honors and rewards. Beneath, as not having obtained, though within reach of, the crown, is a young knight ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... steadfast eyes, or was hidden behind that smooth and placid brow, then I thought must the very angels be false! If falsehood could shroud itself behind a mask of such surpassing loveliness, such an aspect and personification of all that is pure, and innocent, and faithful, and true, "where," I asked myself, "oh! where is truth to be found?" That my mother had, all unwittingly, and in some inexplicable manner aroused my father's suspicions, I could not doubt; but, after all, the matter was manifestly, ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... experiences, which are not found in the classic ideals. Now Jeff knew nothing of the classic ideal—did not know that a thousand years ago certain sensual idiots had, with brush and chisel, inflicted upon the world the personification of the strongest and most delicate, most controlling and most subtle passion that humanity is capable of, in the likeness of a thick-waisted, idealess, expressionless, perfectly contented female animal; and that thousands of idiots had since then insisted ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... at the supper-table the personification of quiet geniality, but Amy thought she had never seen him look so hollow-eyed. The long strain was beginning to tell on him, decidedly, and to-night he felt as if he had received a mortal blow. But with indomitable courage he hid his wound, and ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... gone, an hour or two, when the smooth surface of the river is broken in several places, and out burst two or three heads of hippopotami. Although, according to Disco Lillihammer, the personification of ugliness, these creatures do not the less enjoy their existence. They roll about in the stream like puncheons, dive under one another playfully, sending huge waves to the banks on either side. They gape hideously with their tremendous jaws, which look as ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... would, in my limited experience, engender a slight unrest among the tuneful Nine. Yet let her gracefully lean above a woodland pool, roll back her sleeves and open the collar of her shooting shirt, and she becomes a personification of glory to him who waits near the fire he has built for their evening meal. But she must have looked danger in the face with him, slept near him beneath the stars; knowing, should she be affrighted in the night, that her call will bring his reassuring answer, but also ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... own account. He was confronted by something wholly outside all his calculations. He had enlisted merely as a lieutenant and had never considered that he would be called on to assume authority as chief in the field. He had been led to serve with Flagg because the old man was the personification of permanency in the north country—seemed to be something that could not be shaken by the assaults of the Comas—a man who impressed all as being above the hazards of death and accident. Somehow, after all the years and because he had been there ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... not exclusively a poetic use. In ordinary speech personification is very frequent: the pilot speaks of his boat as feminine; the engineer speaks so ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... stared fixedly up over my head into the air. The lamp beat upon his face, and so intent was it and so still that it might have been that of a clear-cut classical statue, a personification ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... and the duty of saluting the Virgin (Virgo) and announcing her conception by the Holy Ghost or third person in the Trinity was assigned to the genius of Spring. In the Chaldean version of the Gospel story the name of Gabriel was given to this personification, and in the Christian version of that story he is made to perform the same ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... of the god signifies in Greek, ALL, Pan came to be considered a symbol of the universe and personification of Nature; and later still to be regarded as a representative of all the gods, and ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... slowly and gazed off into space. Watching her, Mason North drew a deep breath, for into her changing expression there came a look of implacable, passionless vengeance which made her for the moment the personification of Fate. ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... is needless to continue the colloquy. My heart bled for him. His tale of want and woe was told with the honest simplicity of truth. He did not shed any tears, but looked as though he was past weeping—like the personification ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... British Gallery a year or two ago. It was a suffusion of golden light. The Goddess wore her saffron-coloured robes, and appeared just risen from the gloomy bed of old Tithonus. Her very steeds, milk-white, were tinged with the yellow dawn. It was a personification of the morning. Poussin succeeded better in classic than in sacred subjects. The latter are comparatively heavy, forced, full of violent contrasts of colour, of red, blue, and black, and without the true prophetic inspiration of the characters. But in his pagan allegories ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... objects, the Greeks could not be easily surpassed. In reality, it was not personification with them,—it was simply the result of the ideas they had formed regarding causation. If a river flowed down, fringed with flowery banks, they imagined there must be some cause for this, and so they summoned up before their fancy a beautiful river-god ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... completed the expressive allegory. The Demon of Famine, who, should the waters fail of their inundation, or not reach the elevation indicated by the position of the transverse beam upon the upright, would reign in all his horrors over their desolated lands. This symbolical personification was, therefore, represented as a miserable emaciated wretch, who had grown up 'as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground, who had no form nor comeliness; and when they should see him, there was no beauty that they should desire him.' ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... wanton in his mischiefs, and his shrunk, hollow eyes smiled on his ruins." There is fancy in these of a lower order from "Bonduca": "Then did I see these valiant men of Britain, like boding owls creep into tods of ivy, and hoot their fears to one another nightly." Not that it is a personification, only it just caught my eye in a little extract-book I keep, which is full of quotations from B. and F. in particular, in which authors I can't help thinking there is a greater richness of poetical fancy than in any ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... Lieutenant Loring which led to such extreme precaution. The major was close-mouthed, and, for him, rather stern. He held aloof from his juniors all day long and seemed to be keeping an eye and an ear attent on Nevins. That officer's conduct was a puzzle. Six months before he was the personification of all that was lavish, hospitable, good-natured, extravagant. Everybody was apparently welcome to the best he had. Then came the collapse, his arrest, his flight, his capture and confinement, his laughing defiance of his accusers until he found how much more they knew than he supposed, ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... and did anyone ever listen to the reply? Sometimes a studiously courteous questioner will show so much thought in the matter as to answer it himself, by declaring that had he looked at you he needn't have asked; meaning thereby to signify that you are an absolute personification of health: but such persons are only ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... shaped like the young moon which was visible above her breast, believed her to be the priestess or oracle of their worship. This worship evidently had its origin in Ancient Egypt since, although they did not seem to know it, the priestess was nothing less than a personification of the great goddess Isis, and the Ivory Child, their fetish, was a statue of the infant Horus, the fabled son of Isis and Osiris whom the Egyptians looked upon as the overcomer of Set or the Devil, the murderer of ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... in that way about Mr. Kellerman, at least, not to me." Few of her college mates had ever seen Jane angry. They all considered her the personification of even-tempered serenity. ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... role reduced to a single question, the formation of new combinations.—The principal intellectual factor is thinking by analogy. Why it is an almost inexhaustible source of creation. Its mechanism. Its processes reducible to two, viz.: personification, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... Netherlands, or perhaps an impersonation of the Compromise and the Request. Besides the chief inscription on the pedestal, were sculptured various bas-reliefs; and the spectator, whose admiration for the Governor-general was not satiated with the colossal statue itself, was at liberty to find a fresh, personification of the hero, either in a torch-bearing angel or a gentle shepherd. The work, which had considerable esthetic merit, was executed by an artist named Jacob Jongeling. It remained to astonish and disgust the Netherlanders until it was thrown down and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... technique, or even of mere unbreathing beauty. Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha is the humorous soliloquy of an imaginary organist over a fugue in F minor by an imaginary composer, named in the title. It is a mingling of music and moralising. The famous description of a fugue, and the personification of its five voices, is a brilliantly ingenious tour de force; and the rough humour is quite in keeping with the dramatis persona. In complete contrast to Master Hugues is A Toccata of Galuppi's,[31] one of the daintiest, most musical, most witching and haunting ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... is likely to publish them if he meets with encouragement in England, I suppose. They are full of imagery, encompassed with poetical atmosphere, and very melodious. On the other hand, there is vagueness and too much personification. It's the smell of a rose rather than a rose—very sweet, notwithstanding. His poems are far superior to Charles Tennyson's, bear in mind. As for the poet, we quite love him, Robert and I do. What Swedenborg calls 'selfhood,' the ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... is accompanied by the morning-breath (Dam-i-Subh), the current of air, almost imperceptible except by the increase of cold, which Moslem physiologists suppose to be the early prayer offered by Nature to the First Cause. The Ghoul-i-Biybn (Desert-Demon) is evidently the personification of mans fears and of the dangers that surround travelling in the wilds. The wold-where-none-save-He (Allah)-can-dwell is a great and terrible wilderness (Dasht-i-l-siw Hu); and Allahs Holy Hill is Araft, near Mecca, which the Caravan reaches after passing ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... English poets. Perhaps he is the youthfullest of them all. We return to him as to the purest well, the fountain farthest removed from the highway of desultory life. He is so natural and cheerful, compared with later poets, that we might almost regard him as a personification of spring. To the faithful reader his muse has even given an aspect to his times, and when he is fresh from perusing him, they seem related to the golden age. It is still the poetry of youth and life, rather than of thought; and though the moral vein is obvious and constant, it has not yet ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... the Great Temple, the gods made obeisance to him, and took up their positions on each side of him, and informed him that they awaited his words. Addressing Nu, the personification of the World- ocean, Ra bade them to take notice of the fact that the men and women whom his Eye had created were murmuring against him. He then asked them to consider the matter and to devise a plan of action for him, for he was unwilling ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... the shadow of a man. And Stevenson shows a sense of this in two of his very finest stories, the exquisite idyll of Will o' the Mill and the grim history of Markheim. Each of these stories is the work of a poet, by no means of a goblin-fancier. The personification of Death is as old as poetry; it is wrought with moving gentleness in that last scene in the arbour of Will's inn. The wafted scent of the heliotropes, which had never been planted in the garden since Marjory's death, the light in the room that had been hers, prelude the arrival at the gate ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... glory had to furnish sufficient solace for all mortal defeats. At the same time all criticism had to be deprecated, for reflection would at once have pointed out that the divine life in question was either a personification of natural processes and thus really in flux and full of oblivion and imperfection, or else a hypostasis of certain mental functions and ideals, which could not really be conceived apart from the natural human life which they informed and from which ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... consulars and pallid magistrates rushed to the Temple of Vesta to proffer their last hurried vows, before speeding away to Capua, their refuge; Fabia stood all day beside the altar, stately, gracious, yet awe-inspiring, the fitting personification of the benignant Hearth Goddess, who was above the petty passions of mortals and granted to ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... or two, watching the petals blow from the last roses on the bush that hung over the worn stone wall. The old Abbey lay on one hand, the buildings of the new school on the other. They seemed the very personification ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... would develop one here myself. What an accursed country!" Yes, it is not an elysium; and when one allows the dirt, heat, and discomfort to wither all power of endurance, the Soudan becomes a horror and anathema, particularly in the summer time. Now, the camel is to me the personification of animal wretchedness, a fit creature for the wilderness. The Arabs have a legend that the Archangel Michael, anxious to try his skill at creative work, received permission to make an attempt, and the camel was the issue of his bungling handiwork. Poor brute, his capacity ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... ferocious attack in an article called "Judaism in Music." Yet his first flirtation was with a Jewess, and it was not his fault that he did not marry her. She lived in Leipzig, and was a friend of his sister. She had the highly racial name of Leah David, and was a personification of Jewish beauty, with her eyes and hair of jet and her Oriental features. It has been remarked that all of Wagner's heroes and heroines fall in love ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... with a broad, provincial accent, somewhat difficult to locate, but quite unlike the hoarse, guttural tones of the low-class Parisian. His enthusiasm made him seem impressive. He looked, in his ragged, dust-stained clothes, the very personification of the squalid herd which had driven culture, art, refinement to the scaffold in order to make way for sordid vice, and satisfied ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Tarzan selected a cigarette from his case, and lighted it. De Coude was the personification of coolness—was he not the best ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... witness some of the depths of Mona's character. What was there in her nature so entirely different from anything we had ever known? We had seen persons of cheerful disposition before, and had heard of many exhibitions of courage and indifference to danger, but here we had the very personification of fearlessness and contentment. She talked freely of our situation and of what was likely to happen, but appeared to be as light-hearted as ever, and her song was just as cheerful as it had been in her ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... state palanquins glittering with their various ornaments, and escorted by a suite of a hundred kingly personages, with their martial array of the four hosts, of cavalry, elephants, chariots, and infantry, and accompanied by Amazon girls, lovely as the suite of the gods, himself a personification of majesty, bearing the white parasol of dominion, with a golden staff and tassels, began ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... come without company, but alight in flocks, and a whole flock of misfortunes it was to the Liberator when Joshua Coffin, "that huge personification of good humor," was appointed canvassing agent for the paper. He was as wanting in business methods as his employers were. Confusion now gathered upon confusion around the devoted heads of the partners, was accelerated and became daily more and more portentous and inextricable. The delinquencies ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... have," Sheldon said quickly. "You were telling me a lie of that order only the other day. You remember when you were going up the lantern-halyards hand over hand? Your face was the personification of duplicity." ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... alone in opposition to the idea of Deity intervening to interrupt established order, but also to that of imposture and conscious fraud; Otfr. Mueller, when he proved that Greek mythology, far from containing moral abstractions or historical facts, is the involuntary personification of surrounding nature, subsequently developed by imagination; Max Mueller, even, when he creates the new science of comparative mythology—what else are they doing but applying and working out Herder's ideas? And if we turn our eyes to other nations, what else were Burke ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... sad, inexpressibly sad, to see the grand and good man—the image of himself, yet not himself, with bowed head and bent form, the very personification of humility—wandering forth on that lonely island ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... the First Consul, it might be said that the one represented the Constituent Assembly, with a slight perfume of the old regime, and the other the Convention in all its brutality. Bonaparte regarded Fouche as a complete personification of the Revolution. With him, therefore, Fouche's influence was merely the influence of the Revolution. That great event was one of those which had made the most forcible impression on Bonaparte's ardent ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... of speech, one must be struck at once with the delicacy and the vigor of Lanier's imagination. The poet's fancy personifies what at first blush seems to us incapable of personification. Thus at one time*1* he likens men to clover-leaves and the Course-of-things to the browsing ox, which makes way with the clover-heads; while at another he addresses an old red hill of Georgia as "Thou gashed and hairy Lear Whom ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... from this explanation, and one of the favourite sandbanks in which this particular kind of human ostrich plunges its head is "Nature." "Nature does this," and "Nature does that," forgetting entirely the fact that "Nature" is a mere personification and means either chance-medley or a Creator, according to the old dilemma. There is a very curious example of this inability or unwillingness to admit—perhaps even to understand—the force of this argument exhibited by those to whom one ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... institution he had served so long, and his safety in his position, lay in the possession of negative qualities. His silence was interpreted as an indication of wisdom, and the firmly cut features of his inscrutable face would have served an artist as a personification of discipline. As he exchanged the conventional greetings the occasion demanded, he might even then have been standing for the portrait of himself that was one day to be added to those of his predecessors on the library wall; or he ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... While I was expostulating with him as to the reasons for my detention, a boat rowed alongside, from out of which came two personages dressed in black. I knew them to be familiars of the Inquisition; and it immediately occurred to me that my personification of the lady abbess had been discovered, and that my doom was sealed. The captain pointed me out; they collared and handed me into the boat, and pulled for the shore ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... with our time, it has believed in the reality of its hypothesis; if it has worshipped the inconceivable object; if, after being apprehended in this act of faith, it persists knowingly, but no longer voluntarily, in this opinion of a sovereign being which it knows to be only a personification of its own thought; if it is on the point of again beginning its magic invocations,—we must believe that so astonishing an hallucination conceals some mystery, which deserves ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... observing, that the poem was not calculated to excite passion in any mind, or to make any impression except on poetic readers; and that from the culpable levity betrayed at the close of the eclogue by the grotesque union of epigrammatic wit with allegoric personification, in the allusion to the 175 most fearful of thoughts, I should conjecture that the 'rantin' Bardie', instead of really believing, much less wishing, the fate spoken of in the last line, in application to any human individual, would shrink from passing ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... evil into a concrete form, which changed with the varying impressions of climate, food, and the state of intellectual progress. To the white man the Devil was black, and to the black man white. Originally, then, the Devil was merely a personification of the apparently destructive forces of nature. Fire was his element. The Indians had their Rakshas and Uragas, the Egyptians their Typhon, and the Persians their Devas. The Israelites may claim ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... human prayer and sympathetic to human emotion the forces which rule the universe. But in this work of portraiture the Buddhists laid more emphasis on moral and spiritual law than did the Brahmans: they isolated in personification qualities not found isolated in nature. Siva is the law of change, of death and rebirth, with all the riot of slaughter and priapism which it entails: Vishnu is the protector and preserver, the type of good ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... poetic taste to advantage. There, in the midst of a luxuriant garden, she resides with her beautiful Angelo, a child of graceful form who was washed ashore from the sad wreck years ago, but now approaching the years of manhood, and in his looks the very personification of a young Mercury, blending the fire and passion of a Southern nature with the zeal ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... handsome groom; and exclaimed in their hearts: How sad the father! How lofty, proud, exultant the mother! How like her to move heaven and earth to make this marriage! The attendants posed awkwardly, a personification of the uselessness of their situation, and they pitied the bride while they envied him for whose friendship they stood. The bridesmaids graced their position and gloried in it, and serenely smiled, and thought that to be launched ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... and the figure advances to the fancy: one expects Night to be waked before one looks at her again, if ever one can be prevailed upon to take one's eyes away. The bat and owl are going soon to rest, and the lamp burns more faintly as when day begins to approach. The personification of Night is wonderfully hit off. But Guercino is such a painter! We were driving last night to look at the Colisseo by moon-light—there were a few clouds just to break the expanse of azure and shew the gilding. I thought how like a sky ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... The men of the Middle Ages often wrote, as we do, in direct terms and of simple things, but when they wished to rise above the commonplace they turned with a frequency which to-day appears astonishing to the devices of abstract personification and veiled meanings. No doubt this tendency was due in part to an idealizing dissatisfaction with the crudeness of their actual life (as well as to frequent inability to enter into the realm of deeper and finer thought without the aid of somewhat mechanical ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher |
